On Sun, 25 Mar 2012 23:58:15 -0400 (EDT), Marc Shapiro wrote:
I should have googled before posting. Aparently lilo is not capable of
recognizing USB keyboards, but the BIOS can. All I needed to do was
find the right BIOS option. The only tricky part was that this option
(in my BIOS) says nothing about keyboards. The option was for allowing
legacy USB support in DOS! Who looks for that?!? Once I found it,
everything is working just fine.
Yes, LILO uses the BIOS interface to the keyboard (int 16h, functions
00h (GET KEYSTROKE), 01h (CHECK FOR KEYSTROKE), and 02h (GET SHIFT FLAGS);
so the BIOS must be set up to allow these keyboard BIOS calls to work
with USB keyboards. That's a useful tip, Marc. I have not encountered
this in any of the machines that I use LILO on that have USB keyboards,
but obviously not all machines use the BIOS settings that LILO needs
by default. Please provide more detailed information (i.e. what kind of
BIOS was it? Award? IBM? Phoenix? AMI? What was the BIOS date?
Exactly what menu options did you drill down through to find the setting?)
I'd like to include this as an example problem on my LILO web page
http://users.wowway.com/~zlinuxman/lilo.htm
so please be as detailed as you can.